Life after COVID-19 will most likely consist of post-quarantine jokes with coworkers, waning off of homemade cocktails, and deciding how much time we want to spend in the office. No matter the cadence, future offices may look and feel a little different from when we last entered them.
Soon after the US locked down indefinitely last year, major companies like Twitter and Coinbase outlined a hybrid model for their employees, allowing them to choose to work remotely or in person permanently. Following suit, REI sold their eight-acre, never-used HQ to Facebook and promised several satellite campuses around the Puget Sound region to take its place.
With the pandemic disrupting the traditional centralized office model, less dense workspaces may take on a new design formula than previous offices.
"We find it very exciting, as the pandemic has essentially been an accelerator for change," said Clive Wilkinson, president and design director of Clive Wilkinson Architects. "We are able to shake off so many old habits and reprogram our lives in a better way. Technology and the internet have facilitated this highly mobile 'work anywhere' future, and now we can implement it."
Building community with chance encounters
Wilkinson is the designer behind visionary campuses like Google's 500,000-square-foot Silicon Valley headquarters, Nokia's headquarters in Finland, Microsoft's Seattle headquarters expansion, and many more inventive workspaces. Currently, he told Insider, he's discussing plans with a couple of companies to create a "distributed 'necklace' of smaller hubs encircling the city"— otherwise known as satellite offices.
Wilkinson, a long-time conceptual idealist on what the modern office should look like, drew up plans in 2015 for the 'Endless Workplace' project. Although satirical, the conceptual design was prescient in anticipating worker's need to work close to home and engage in their local community. With the disruption of COVID-19, his firm must again adapt to the change in workers' needs.
"The first human need that the office satisfies is a place of community," he said. "Therefore, a place that offers community will work even when the community offered is not your entire team, group, or department, but something more heterogeneous."
With the option to work from home, employees may find themselves sharing the workday with coworkers they've never met versus seeing the same teammates every day.
Wilkinson referenced the 1973 social-science theory of "weak connections." The argument is people have different levels of connections to their social network. Strong connections are deep ties to family, friends, or familiar coworkers. In contrast, weak connections are strangers or people you're less familiar with.
"Of course, being present with your team is very important, but the concept of 'weak connections' has been shown to be very critical to innovation thinking," he said. "New satellite offices will offer new 'weak links' and serendipitous connections with a high degree of diversity in skill sets. This could have a very beneficial effect on worker productivity, while team collaboration can still occur using the same VC tools that have been habitualised during the pandemic."
Robert Mankin, partner and head of the workplace design practice at the architecture firm NBBJ, also highlighted the benefit of "chance interactions" in the office with people you may not regularly come into contact with.
"It's incredibly difficult to build culture remotely, and it's nearly impossible to learn from another in a serendipitous way when one is virtual," he said. "Serendipity, or chance interactions, has demonstrable benefits to companies and their people."
A focus on collaboration over heads-down work
Post-pandemic offices could be designed to foster these chance encounters by having open floor plans and more collaborative spaces and relying less on an activity-based model.
With the popularity of coworking spaces, like WeWork, the open floor plan evolved into an activity-based model, where there are a variety of spaces for different activities, such as relaxation spaces, small call rooms, or places to put your head down and focus. However, these activity-based spaces can be cut down if you can do solo work at home.
According to Mankin, COVID-19 accelerated the trend of offices becoming more about collaborative, creative work and less about heads-down work.
"The office will continue to play an important role in people's lives, but not as a place to go to work in isolation or heads down on their computers for an entire day," he said. "The office will be a dynamic environment that is about health, culture, creativity, and interaction — where the innovation is happening. People will want to engage this, but for most it won't need to be every day of the week. And if they need to do focused tasks, they will likely stay home or work remotely."
Prioritizing healthy spaces
Health is also a major theme Mankin is looking to capitalize on as the pandemic rages on.
"We're looking at how the workplace can be truly restorative and address not only personal safety, but also broader notions of health, such as the physical and mental health of workers, healthy teams, organizations, and even community health and cohesion," he said.
As more and more companies choose to migrate to a hybrid-working model, Mankin said he thinks a majority of NBBJ's clients will prioritize in-person working. The new hybrid model is still in the early stages of adoption, but will likely affect how we approach the future of work.
"I do believe that new design propositions for the new workplaces can and will have a powerful impact on the lives of knowledge workers," Wilkinson said. "A hybrid life opens up new freedoms to move and to engage in the world in new ways."
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